Bored with the two-hour wait for everybody to get their stuff together for breakfast, the director storms off back towards our hostel, thereby stumbling across a bunch of peasants slaughtering a pig in a field. It is a wedding party, getting ready for a blowout tomorrow where 1000 guests will work their way through a quarter of a tonne of pork, 184 chicken feet, 40 chickens (feet included), and by my calculations, about 30 carp. A conga line of assistants is bringing in one-gallon containers of vegetable soup, which until last week appeared to have contained industrial paint. The film crew swiftly invades the scene, with Mack the fixer running point to befriend the responsible parties, armed with several packets of fags to hand out.

We get footage of the production line of chickens being slaughtered, boiled, plucked and skinned; the fish being gutted; the pigs being blowtorched, much of it in the open air on the waste ground by the power station, which is apparently where the happy couple’s home has been built. The blushing bride is four months pregnant, and reveals that there is no ceremony as such. Just her and her husband welcoming guests at a jerry-built arbour, she handing out melon seeds, and him handing out fags. If we’re lucky she will put on new tracksuit. Then they will stage eight or nine sittings for dinner to get through their thousand anticipated guests, and in the evening there will be some dancing.

So, not actually a wedding at all. Two common-law cohabitants are staging a dinner party presumably to get their hands on some gifts, as every one of the thousand guests is expected to hand over some money. But it’ll do. The director, who has been ill for a week and miserable for most of the shoot, is so pleased with herself for discovering this ready-made big finish for the episode that she smiles for a whole ten minutes.

We manage to interview the bride in her family’s restaurant in the afternoon. She turns out to be one of those people the camera loves, and goes from plain to gorgeous when Daniel the cameraman fiddles with his lenses. However, two other crew members have take over the interview, because I am temporarily indisposed, groaning on the throne back in the hotel (probably too much information for you, but nothing I have eaten has stayed inside me long for the last three days). Although I rush back to take my spot as the interviewer, they tell me to stay out of it, because they have “already established a rapport.” Which leaves me with nothing to do but grin like a loon at the back, as they crash the interview into the floor, distracting the subject, leading her into one-word answers, fluffing their questions and failing to pursue any new openings revealed in the answers.

I’d been feeling for a couple of days that I was not achieving much, but watching them tank it reminds me that I do often contribute to the production, sometimes in almost imperceptible ways like knowing what questions to ask. The ingredients list for the wedding menu above, for example, was something I assembled on my own initiative, sending Mack the fixer into the kitchen to get the precise numbers while the director was still trying to decide where to place the camera. It formed the basis of my 20 seconds on camera which would have otherwise been simply “Ooh, look, a wedding!”

The director growls a warning that I am starting to sound like Fluffy, her term of abuse for a presenter on another series who tried to turn everything into a cooking show. Before you ask, her term of abuse for me is either Chicken Wings, because of the way I stand, or Treediot, because I don’t know anything about plants.

I try very hard to enjoy myself on location. I see places that I would never in a million years even think of going to, and on the good days, there is lovely Chinese food. But on this trip we have been particularly out in the boonies, away from good restaurants and flushing toilets, and that has taken its toll. So instead I keep my mind on the money.

If we were better embedded in the village, it would have been fun for me to be one of the kitchen skivvies trying to feed a thousand people, but the best we can do is gawp at the industrial production-line quality of such a large-scale meal.

Mickey the sound man is waylaid by three girls plying brownish, gloopy local ale, and forced to drink three cups of it before he is allowed through the front gate. I myself have to keep moving to avoid similar aggressive hospitality. The director succumbs to a couple of the niblets in the kitchen, but soon cries off the food when she sees leftover soup being poured back into the industrial paint containers from whence it came, ready to be ladled out again to some other guest.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E04), 2018.